Chomsky's Politics

Besides being perhaps the most important living linguist, Noam Chomsky has also for the past 25 years been a leading political commentator and critic. In this role he has been somewhat less influential, if for no other reason than that the media powers that be have consistently shunned him. His political books (latest count: more than 20) are not reviewed in the major papers and even NPR avoids him. So the picture of Chomsky's political philosophy this book provides is a useful one, focusing especially on his assault on journalism's self-censorship and corporate control of the mass media, areas well illustrated by Chomsky's own career. And we learn that Chomsky, far from being a strident elitist, aims to reach the "vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent," and is known to reply to letters from strangers within days in voluminous but polite single-spaced detail.